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Epic Games announced today that it will not distribute its massively popular gameFortniteon Android through Google’s Play Store marketplace. Instead, the company plans to directly distribute the software to players through the officialFortnitewebsite, where Android users can download aFortniteInstaller program to install the game on compatible devices. The newsconfirms reports from earlier this weekthat Epic would bypass Google for the Android launch of the game.

EPIC WOULD RATHER NOT GIVE GOOGLE 30 OF EVERY IN-APP PURCHASE

The second reason is financial: Epic does not want to pay Google’s 30 percent cut, especially considering the entire game is funded through in-app purchases. “The 30 percent store tax is a high cost in a world where game developers’ 70 percent must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games,” Sweeney says. “There’s a rationale for this on console where there’s enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers.”

But on mobile platforms that are open, like Android, “30 percent is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service,” he says. Sweeney adds that Epic is “intimately familiar with these costs” from its direct distribution ofFortniteon Mac and PC.

Fortniteon iOSmade $15 million in its first three weekson the market, so it’s reasonable to assume the mobile version of the game is a sizable source of revenue for Epic. Last month, the company alsoreduced the revenue cutit takes from developers who use its Unreal Engine software, in part because of the ongoing financial success ofFortnite.

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30% is a large cut so I can see the temptation of not going with the playstore, and in a way it's good they are not just blindly accepting it. Given the popularity of Fornite this will be a big monetary loss for Google, even if they were only to take say 10%.

On the other hand, it is frustrating as it is the most convenient way of downloading apps and I share the concerns that younger more naive audiences might download what they think is Fornite but is in fact malware.

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But will it be on Apple app store? Because Apple also takes a 30% cut of everything, and iPhones have no other way of getting apps.

If they make more off Android users, they damn well provide good support for those users.

Not that I play mobile games at all...

It's already on Apple store. They don't really have a choice - you can't sideload apps on iOS as a regular user.
I do agree that this is a terrible move. I already see all the apps promising free in-game currency and fake Fortnite apps. Also updated will be very annoying to manage.

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It's already on Apple store. They don't really have a choice - you can't sideload apps on iOS as a regular user.
I do agree that this is a terrible move. I already see all the apps promising free in-game currency and fake Fortnite apps. Also updated will be very annoying to manage.

I don't see updates being a terrible nuisance as it can probably simply be handled by the game itself. Unreal Engine 4 likely already has some backend built in to handle standalone updates, or otherwise a client side software can be implemented to handle downloading and updating the game.

There is quite a divide in opinion here though. The biggest strength of Android is in being able to bypass any centralized market and install whatever the user wants, though it is also a big security flaw for those without the know-how to understand the responsibility. (Certainly a big problem during the Windows XP days.)

A 30% cut of a very high grossing game is quite significant. I can certainly understand why Epic would want to bypass the Play Store. However, this is quite a brazen move by, this will push the responsibility onto them for providing some means of security and support as well, owing to the playerbase being the impulsive type. The game being high profile will likely mean a lot of scammers and fake clients too. If things go badly, I could see the high school tech nerds making a lot of money in fixing borked devices.

Amazon's own market doesn't seem to have too many issues, so with the right measures implemented (a small sideloaded client program that is responsible for downloading and keeping the game updated and secured), this could go off without a hitch. It will be vitally important for Epic to communicate to the userbase the safe sites for downloading the client software.